“Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga come é, bisogna che tutto cambi”
Most useful in understanding the
different outcomes of what appear to be similar processes in Tunisia and Egypt
are the words Tomasi Di Lampedusa places in the mouth of Prince Tancredi
Falconieri in the novel Il Gattopardi (The Leopard). A challenge to an elite faced with ruin, they
form the epigraph to this essay: If
you want things to stay as they are, they have to change. Lampedusa’s novel is set in Sicily during the
unsettled conditions of the Risorgimento.
The problem confronting the old nobility is what to do in the face of
the new Italian nationalism and the revolutionary changes to the state and
society that Giuseppe Garibaldi hoped to impose. To preserve its influence and elite status
(that is, to ensure that nothing changes), the family must accept the new forms
of governance (that is, accept that everything has changed). Prince Tancredi’s observation suggests that
we think of the old elites, even in a revolutionary uprising, as active participants
who are neither passive nor innocent.
The recent legislative elections in
Tunisia provided an increasingly rare moment of optimism. Political analysts are especially happy with
Tunisia. It has garnered high praise for
passing the “Huntington two-turnover” test that every other Arab country has failed:
the party that dominated the government immediately after the fall of the
authoritarian regime has now peacefully given way to its opposition. Tunisia’s
October legislative election therefore marks what political scientists call the
consolidation of democracy because it seems that all political actors accept
the verdict of the ballot box.
Explanations
of the divergent political outcomes in Tunisia, where an Islamist party peacefully
ceded what power it had gained, and Egypt, in which a similar party was
forcibly ousted, have subtly and forcefully been attributed to a multitude of
causes. Among the most commonly proposed reasons is that the revolutionary
youth never gained mass support or had a solid organization either to compete
with the Islamists in elections or push the revolution to its conclusion. But looking at Egypt and Tunisia together
tells us that’s wrong. The revolutionary
youth in both Egypt and Tunisia had little impact on the outcome either way
whereas the old elite had a very large impact.
Democratization succeeded in Tunisia because the old elite was neither
excluded nor subjected to the threat of political or administrative
marginalization.
The underlying thread of many
analyses since December 2010 has been that democracy can be and perhaps should
be the result of a revolutionary rising. It is my belief that democracy, unlike
revolution, is a profoundly conservative as well as inclusive solution to the
problems of social change. Democracy’s success
thus more or less guarantees, for a protracted period of time, that there will
be few political solutions—whether in terms of moderate public policy or
dramatic institutional change—to economic inequality.
There are, as far as I can tell, two
different ways of talking about democratization, social upheaval and
dictatorship. One, largely confined to
the left, focuses on the tectonic plates of social cleavage. These are the elements of the body politic:
workers, farmers, landowners, officials, and a handful of capitalists. The second, far more popular within American
academic circles, largely reduces to the interplay of millions of individuals
who must find ways to resolve their differences whether over constituting the
institutions of governance, property rights, or political participation.
Understanding the larger
sociological background of revolt as well as choices that confront generic
individuals are both worthwhile enterprises.
What I propose here, though, is that we will gain more traction in
understanding the events of the last four years if we focus on a different set
of admittedly elite institutional actors: members of political parties,
government officials, and holders of significant economic resources. The crucial question to be asked is whether
the political conflicts in the wake of a mass uprising and the collapse of a
regime provided a plausible existential threat to any particular group. Rather than thinking of revolution vaguely as
a rapid and complete change, I prefer a definition proposed by Otto Kirchheimer. Does the new regime destroy the possibility
that the old regime and its members can return to power? This saves us from the implicit mysticism of
structural-functionalism and its game-theoretical descendant in which
individuals carry all of society’s institutions in their own heads. It allows
us to focus on the crucial aspect of democracy:
are all parties, including the ones ousted by the collapse of
authoritarianism, able to contest for governance?
Of the many
contextual differences between Tunisia and Egypt we can note three. First the Egyptian courts had a much longer
history of systematic intervention in political disputes than did their
counterparts. Second, the Tunisian
military had never in the 20th century played a direct role in
political or government life. Third, the
level of mass mobilization in Egypt before the collapse of the authoritarian
regime was far wider and exhibited much higher levels of spontaneity than did
those in Tunisia. This is another way of
saying that politics in Tunisia more directly displayed the underlying
capacities of institutions and organizations than did those in Egypt.
In both Tunisia and
Egypt the authoritarian regime centered on a particular figure who had been in
power for decades and around whom an increasingly small coterie of family and
close associates clustered. By 2010 wide
sections of the political elite in each country had been marginalized by a
narrow group at the very pinnacle of authority.
In each country the regime
maintained its grip on power partly through reliance on the police and partly
through the manipulation of a single party (the Constitutional Democratic Rally
in Tunisia and the National Democratic Party in Egypt).
In early 2010 there
was every reason to think that Egypt was more likely to experience a successful
transition to democracy than Tunisia. Egypt
had a far more open press environment, more competitive elections, and had
experienced more turnover among government ministers. For example, in 2010 the Tunisian prime
minister, Mohammad Ghannouchi, was the same one who had been appointed more
than 20 years earlier by Ben Ali. Atef
Ebeid, who President Mubarak had appointed as Prime Minister in 1999 (when
Ghannouchi assumed his office) to replace Kamal Ganzouri had departed after a
five year term. Ahmad Nazif, Ebeid’s
successor, had only served seven years when he was replaced on January 30, 2011. Egypt had had three prime ministers in the
two decades during which Tunisia had one.
The story of the
protests in Tunisia and the massive uprisings in Egypt is sufficiently well
known for me not to repeat it. In its
place it is worth looking more closely at other aspects of the subsequent
events in the two countries. In some
ways they are remarkably similar but in other respects they differ
notably. An understandable desire by
many observers and analysts to conflate a revolutionary uprising with the
process of democratic transition has created a narrative that now lacks not
only many details but is, in some ways, a significant distortion of the
political trajectory of the two countries.
As strikes and
demonstrations became more widespread in both countries, members of the
judiciary played an early role in shaping events. Reformist judges appeared from the first days
of the uprising in Tahrir square while in Tunisia the country’s attorneys were
on strike by January 6. Violence against
property in the protests led to the promulgation of a curfew in both Tunis and
Cairo and in both places the Armed Forces refused to fire on
demonstrators. In Cairo, however, where
Field Marshal Mohammed Tantawi was both supreme commander of the Armed Forces
and Minister of Defense, the army’s chain of command remained intact and
shielded from civilian interference. In
Tunis, President Ben Ali dismissed the commander of the Armed Forces Rachid
Ammar on January 13. Ammar was
re-instated the following day by long-serving Prime Minister Ghannouchi who Ben
Ali had deputized as president before he fled the country.
The Tunisian Supreme Court first appeared as an actor in the transition on January 15 when it declared that Ben Ali was not incapacitated but had quit the presidency. Consequently, Fouad Mebaza3, the speaker of the Assembly, was installed as president rather than Ghannouchi, who then remained as Prime Minister. Mebaza3, a member of the RCD Central committee since 1988, served as the president of Tunisia until December 13, 2011 when he was replaced by the human rights activist and Ben Ali opponent, Moncef Marzouki. Had the Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Court made a similar ruling when Mubarak left office, it would have declared that either the speaker of the Assembly, Fathi Sorour or Farouk Sultan, president of the court, was his constitutional successor. Both men were as closely associated with Mubarak as Mebaza3 was to Ben Ali.
By January 17, Prime
Minister Ghannouchi announced a new cabinet which contained 12 members of the CDR
including former defense minister Ridha Grira, a graduate of the distinguished
French institute for training high-level civil servants, the Ecole Nationale
d’Administration (a distinction he shares with Adly Mansour, the president of
the Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Court who served as President of the
Republic from the ouster of Mohammad Morsi in 2013 until the election of
Abdel-Fattah Al-Sissi in 2014).
Initial attempts to
contain popular unrest that had only grown since Ben Ali fled were
unsuccessful. Neither Ghannouchi’s
resignation from the CDR nor the inclusion of trade union and opposition
political figures silenced protests.
Within a day the trade union ministers had resigned and on January 27
Ghannouchi gave up and resigned as Prime Minister.
Ghannouchi’s
replacement was not an outsider by any stretch of the imagination. On the contrary, he was replaced by an even
more central figure from the old regime.
The new Prime Minister, Beji Caid Essebsi, had served in several key
positions under the Republic’s founder, Habib Bourguiba. Essebsi was defense minister from late 1969
until June 1970 and then served as Ambassador to France. In Tunisia, as in other former French
colonies, the ambassador to Paris is a position of exceptional importance for
economic, political and security issues.
Between 1981 and 1986 Essebsi was the country’s foreign minister. After Ben Ali ousted Bourguiba, Essebsi
moved to the legislature where he was president of the Chamber of Deputies from
1990-1991. Essebsi, who would be Prime
Minister in 2011 until he resigned to make way for Ennahda party leader, Hamadi
Jabali, on December 24 thus played a key role in determining the nature of the
democratic transition. Before the
courts in Tunisia (as in Egypt) dissolved the former ruling party in March, the
Interior Ministry had already suspended it from official activity. Essebsi thus presided over the liquidation
of the party in which he had spent most of his adult career and from which he
would draw many of the leaders for the new party he created for the 2014
legislative elections. Essebsi and his
associates were quintessentially what Egyptians derided as “feloul” or the
remnants of the old regime.
It is possible that Essebsi
only pursued this course under the pressure of demonstrations, but nevertheless
it was Essebsi and a number of politicians from the old regime as well as some
of their long-standing opponents who bore the responsibility for shaping a
democratic outcome in Tunisia. Thus,
speaking on November 10, 2011 at the African Media Leaders forum, Essebsi noted
that it was his government’s responsibility to ensure that the Tunisian
revolution did not devolve into a fratricidal conflict nor deviate from what he
called its virtuous path.
Among the
consequential choices his government made was the exclusion of members of the
CDR from participating in the elections for the constituent assembly. Arguably even more important, however, was
the decision to encourage human rights activist Kamel Jendoubi to preside over
the commission charged with writing the relevant electoral law and carrying out
the election itself, ISIE. Jendoubi and
his fellow commissioners chose to employ a particular version of proportional
representation that provided Ennahda with the number of seats that corresponded
to its share of the vote but that also privileged smaller parties. Other electoral rules, including other
versions of proportional representation, would have translated Ennahda’s 38 %
share of the popular vote into a majority of seats rather than the plurality it
actually received. Ennahda thus, by
design, was unlikely to control the constituent assembly without receiving an
overwhelming majority of the popular vote.
Ennahda had the votes
in the constituent assembly to impose a constitutional article banning members
of the old ruling party from engaging in politics. In fact, just such an article (116) was
drafted into the Tunisian constitution by a majority. Under the rules of the assembly, however, it
was rejected because it did not have the necessary super-majority. The measure
failed to gain a super-majority in large part because of significant number of
Ennahda delegates abstained. Such a
constitutional article would have been an insuperable barrier to the old
political elite regaining influence through electoral politics and would have
made the creation of Essebsi’s Nida’ Tounis, the largest party after the last
elections, impossible. The most widely
cited argument for not excluding former members of the CDR was simply that
there is, in a democracy, no reason for stripping individuals of their political
rights unless they have been convicted of criminal activity. Whether Ennahda representatives were
convinced of this argument on its merits or simply took a more hard-nosed view
of the likely results of excluding their long-time opponents we do not know,
but their decision was consequential.
In Egypt events have
worked out quite differently. There are,
of course, many contextual differences between Egypt and Tunisia but one
obvious and crucial difference was the inability or unwillingness of the Muslim
Brotherhood to find a way to compromise with members of the old regime. On the contrary, the Muslim Brotherhood often
sought to marginalize and exclude as much of the NDP as possible. These
attempts to marginalize and exclude the NDP and its cadre as well as its
leadership were highly popular with a significant portion of the Egyptian
public. The top NDP leadership included
prominent businessmen, religious officials, and government officials all of
whom were widely derided as corrupt figures of an authoritarian regime.
Days before Husni
Mubarak resigned, on February 6, 2011 Vice President Omar Suleiman met with
members of the opposition including the Muslim Brotherhood in an attempt to
broker an agreement about the future of Egypt. These were the days in which
several groups of so-called “wise men”, including some of Egypt’s wealthiest
and most important businessmen as well as academic figures and former officials
engaged a public dialogue through public statements and occasional interviews. Other opposition leaders including Muhammad
El-Baradei opposed the talks which were unpopular with the demonstrators in
Tahrir Square. The Obama administration backed the talks as a way out of the
impasse in Egypt. Both President Obama
and Secretary of State Hilary Clinton called for an orderly transition. Some disarray in the American position
occurred when former US Ambassador Frank Wisner stated that Mubarak would have
to stay in office indefinitely. Press
reports indicated that Mubarak would have agreed not to run for a new term and
that some changes in the laws regarding freedom of expression would have been
made.
The first attempt to broker some kind of
agreement or transitional pact foundered.
Subsequently there were occasional talks between leaders of the MB and
some of their political competitors and more than occasional claims that the MB
had worked out a deal with the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces but nothing
of the kind ever happened. Talks
routinely broke down; bargains once made were scuttled; and a heightened sense
of distrust permeated relationships between all the dominant actors during the
period after Mubarak left office.
Unlike in
Tunisia, it proved, for example, very difficult to win agreement on the nature
of the electoral process as well as substantively limiting the ability of the
Islamist movements to dominate the legislature.
After initially promising to limit itself to contesting 25 % of the
seats, the MB finally decided to contest nearly everywhere. SCAF found it difficult to choose among a
variety of electoral schemes but ultimately chose a mixed system in which some
seats were contested by party list and others by individual candidacy. Parties were nevertheless allowed to contest
the individual seats although it was widely known that the Supreme
Constitutional Court, in several prior decisions, had ruled such contestation unconstitutional.
Anger and
contempt for the political figures of the old regime were common through the
first year of the uprising in Egypt and the MB began to present themselves as a
party dedicated to reforming Egypt by continuing the revolution. Key to this objective was eliminating the
“feloul” or remnants of the old regime.
This was surprising to many Egyptians because there was no reason to
believe that the MB planned to make significant or rapid changes to the
country’s economic or governmental structures which would have been the hallmark
of a revolutionary party as widely understood in Western as well as Egyptian
academic literature.
Circumspect
as the MB was, however, their reaction to the so-called Selmi document of late
2011 shows how different the situation in Egypt was from what obtained in
Tunisia. Ali Al-Selmi, vice prime
minister, drafted a proposal that had the backing of SCAF and the government
which was then still dominated by liberal elements of the old regime and a
handful of its liberal opponents. He
offered a set of supra-constitutional principles to guide the work of the
still-to-be chosen constituent assembly which had many substantive similarities
to earlier such statements issued by the Muslim Brotherhood, his own Wafd
party, and independent forces in March 2011.
It only allowed the civilian government to consider the total budgetary
allocation to the Armed Forces and it gave SCAF the right to prior review of
any legislation affecting the army.
There was opposition to ratifying the military’s hitherto unofficial
authority in the new constitution, but the subsequent constitution drafted a
year later by the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated assembly gave the Armed Forces
significantly more control over its own finances and the government.
His proposal also included significant
restrictions on how the still to be chosen legislature could choose the
constituent assembly. First, Selmi
proposed that elected legislators not be allowed to serve as members of the
constituent assembly. He also proposed a
corporatist plan through which the SCAF would appoint the bulk of the members
of the constituent assembly from the existing institutional framework of
Egyptian society in which unions, professional associations, and other groups
would choose their own representatives.
If implemented, his proposal placed
mild substantive constraints on what the assembly could write but it
egregiously violated one of the few obviously legitimate elements of the
transitional process. That an elected
legislature would choose the constituent assembly was one of a handful of
provisions that had been the object of the March 19 referendum. The MB called for massive demonstrations against
the Selmi proposals and hundreds of thousands of people mobilized against them
including sections of the left. Selmi himself became a lightning rod for
protest and mistrust because of his own connections to the old regime. Selmi
has a doctorate in economics and had served previously in Mubarak
cabinets. He was a prominent member of
the Wafd, generally considered a secular pro-business party with a significant
Christian base of support. Rejecting the
Selmi placed the MB firmly on the side of electoral legitimacy but it suggested
an at best limited tolerance for reaching substantive agreements with the
social, political or economic elite of the old regime.
The Muslim
Brotherhood initiated demonstrations in Tahrir Square and were able to mobilize
significant support against the proposal on November 18, 2011. Police later attacked a sit-in by relatives
of the people killed in the initial uprising and protests continued. These included particularly violent
confrontations between the police and youth, many of whom were drawn from the
ranks of soccer fans and from poorer neighborhoods, which left 41 dead and
perhaps 1,000 wounded. The Selmi
document was another victim and so was the government of Prime Minister Essam
Sharaf who resigned on November 21. He
was replaced by Kamal Ganzouri, who had served as prime minister under Hosny
Mubarak from 1996 to 1999.
From the
left the Muhammad Mahmoud events were widely viewed at the time as evidence
that the Muslim Brotherhood was uninterested in pursuing the revolution to
establish a democratic order. Viewed in
the framework of Tunisian politics, however, they suggest a different interpretation: the Muslim Brotherhood refused to reach an
agreement with members of the old regime about the new structure of the
state. The mobilization of street
demonstrations and the willingness to accept the outcome of the violent confrontations
that it had neither solicited nor endorsed placed the Muslim Brotherhood on a
distinct path in the months to come.
This was the path of electoral politics, themselves a fundamental
process for representative democracy. It
was also, however, a path in which elections and demonstrations together could
be used to marginalize and diminish the role of other institutions of the state
as well as the political opponents of the electoral victors.
In the
succeeding months a far more brutal and direct battle for power developed in
Egypt that took the country in a very different direction from Tunisia. The Muslim Brotherhood coalition gained 45 %
of the seats in the new parliament and, in alliance with the Salafi “Islamist
bloc”, could control the new legislature.
Among other measures it enacted a political ban on members of the old
ruling party which, like its Tunisian equivalent, had been dissolved. The Supreme Constitutional Court struck down
this law as unconstitutional, using language similar to that deployed by
Tunisian legislators in rejecting Article 116.
The Court also voided the elections to the lower house because the
electoral rules violated established court doctrine about the rights of
voters.
This is not
the place to discuss in detail the long conflict between the Muslim
Brotherhood, the courts, and members of the old political class. It is telling that the MB, despite its
commitment to the electoral process and its claims to the necessity of the
alternation of power, remained unwilling to allow the one set of political
activists most likely to challenge its dominance successfully to compete in an
organized fashion for power. It is in
this sense that the MB can legitimately claim to be a revolutionary force. The MB was certainly not an ideological party
committed to socialism, income redistribution, or secularism. For reasons that are too complex to address
here they were certainly committed to eliminating a significant fraction of the
old political class (the “feloul” or remnants of the old regime) and moved as
rapidly as they could to do so.
No doubt
the stories of the Tunisian and Egyptian experiences of political conflict in
the wake of authoritarian collapse are more complex than the one I have told
here. I plan to examine some of those
aspects, including the role of the army, elsewhere. The advantage of this
story, however, is that it takes our attention away from the problems of
secularism, post-secularism, moderation, radicalism and religion and places it
firmly back into the structure of conflict and accommodation between political
and institutional forces.
Sometime before
his tragically premature death I had coffee one morning with Samir Soliman, the
respected Egyptian political scientist.
In the years since it has become common to argue that the failure of the
Egyptian revolution and Egyptian democracy can both be attributed to the
failure of the secular left to organize sufficient popular support to challenge
the Muslim Brotherhood. Seen in this
optic the tragedy of Egypt is the fault of the middle-class intellectuals who
played such conspicuous roles in front of the television cameras in the early
days of the uprising in 2011. Samir had
a different view of how democracy, if it was to work at all, would work in Egypt. The only party that could conceivably
challenge the MB and alternate with it, he argued, was a conservative party. Committed
as he was personally to the politics of the left, he did not that day argue
that the liberal left would be a likely counterweight to the MB nor did he
mention from where such a party would draw its leaders or members.
In Tunisia
it is clear that a conservative-centrist party has emerged to challenge Ennahda
and its roots are heavily in the old regime although it also boasts other
supporters. In Egypt for a variety of
reasons no alternate center-conservative party was built. That would have necessarily been a party with
deep roots in the old NDP, the party many of whose members have re-emerged
since the coup. In the absence of a
thorough-going revolutionary exclusion, they would, I think, have re-emerged
anyway. The question is whether they did
so through elections or as part of an anti-electoral coalition. Attempting to exclude the economic and
political elites of the old regime may have seemed like both revolutionary and
democratic good sense to the Muslim Brothers and to many Islamists and leftists
between 2011 and 2014.
Egyptian
revolutionaries (in the conventional left-wing sense) and the leaders of the MB
feared the re-emergence of the feloul as a political force. They correctly understood that a powerful
conservative party with significant support from Egypt’s business elite was not
a friend. Such a political grouping was
not inclined to support either the projects of economic and social equality
that animated the left or the projects of creating new state institutions that
the MB favored. The MB were committed to
elections. As the old elite increasingly re-asserted itself the MB responded by
attempting to marginalize both their institutional and electoral capacity. In
this they echoed the very old concern of revolutionaries in Europe and Latin
America that electoral democracy is not necessarily the friend of movements for
economic redistribution nor do they necessarily lend themselves to the creation
of strong protections for the political, civil, or social rights of the poor
and the weak.
The idea that democracy is the last
station on the revolutionary road remains seductive and it informs a certain idealized
understanding of American history and the process of democratization. Representative democracy itself, however, is
less likely the successful conclusion of revolution and more likely the
premature end of its utopian hopes and dreams.
Only if nothing changes, can everything change.
